In 1594, the viceroy of Perú don García Hurtado de Mendoza appointed don Pedro Osores de Ulloa as judge of land composition in the province of Charcas, in order to review the questioned performance of his predecessor, don fray Luis López, bishop of Quito, and see his task finished. However, Osores de Ulloa had to operate in the broad fields of Charcas’s politics and economics simultaneously, which exceeded such task. This paper provides a transcription of the Commissions of Osores de Ulloa, with details of orders and powers, and of the Testimony of the cost of the compositions (Testimonio de la cantidad que valieron las composiciones), with the amounts collected by judges of composition during their work. This paper not only makes available to researchers unpublished legal and administrative documents which are central to understand the structure of colonial agrarian and economic system during the late Sixteenth Century, with a detailed analyses of land issues. It also aims to reconstruct the colonial context of Commissions and finally it suggests lines of research opened by the published documentation in order to contribute to social and agrarian history of colonial Charcas.

The present article analyzes the ways in which the issue of the legitimacy of royal power emerges in Vindiciae contra Tyrannos (1579) in the context of the French Wars of Religion. This study specifically shows how the concept of the exercise of king?s power together with its ample desecration becomes central to the text, particularly in connection with the hereditary succession of the prince?s power. In this regard, the analysis highlights the way in which these arguments develop prior to the appearance of the theories of Absolute Monarchy.

As an additional note to other studies on medieval Marian poetry, this article explores the topic of the ‘pre-creation’ of the Virgin Mary, ab initio creata, in certain Castilian cancionero lyric poems, highlighting, in particular, its poetic affiliation with early medieval texts.